I had it explained to me thusly:

Action movies have a lot of murders. Nobody actually died.

Mystery movies have a lot of liars. Nobody was actually deceived.

Cuties has a lot of child sexualization. Children were actually sexualized.

What we're quibbling over now is if the message of the film justifies it - and my answer would be no, there is no message conceivable that would do so.

Watch the movie, make your own opinion.

So the only way I can know if murder is bad is to try it?

"You might like child sexualization - try it!"

Oof.

correct, the documentary isn't about watching kids twerk for a few hours.

it's really about how our culture, amplified by the internet, makes kids believe think twerking at 11 is a good idea, but the kids eventually reject it, and go back to being kids.

You don't get this context if you watch just the first few minutes of it, or shouty media commentary about it.

Part of the controversy was the poster that was released for the marketing. People (I think rightfully) thought it was inappropriate. Personally, I thought it was problematic that this poster was not rejected by anyone at Netflix prior to release. The fact that Netflix backtracked on the poster seems to indicate that they realized the mistake they had made. Again, this mistake should never have happened in the first place.

Do we as a society want our children to think that it's ok for children to be sexualized like this? Yes, I know the argument is that the point of the movie is the opposite, but I'm not going to let my children watch it so that the 'learn' this message. The message should be self evident and not need a movie to make the point. Some may disagree but as a parent I feel very strongly about this.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53846419

There are also credible reviewers noting that the film indulges many more minutes in the controversial imagery than is needed.

You realize the poster was a scene from the movie.

I don't know why people are acting like they amped it up only for the poster. Well, if all you paid attention to was Netflix's lame excuse you could certainly get that impression since they did everything they could to imply that was the case.

Except that's not what happened. They profiled a scene - one scene! If anything there are far more crazy/disgusting scenes in the movie than just that one.

The poster is a red herring. The problem is the movie and it's content. Always has been, still is.

One thing my friends and I agreed on here is that many of the scenes at face value wouldn't be so bad if not for the camerawork. Fine, show kids dancing in a normal shot. Instead, they chose to deliberately zoom in on their private areas, even out-of-place doing so, which pushed it into creepy territory, regardless how the creator intended it.

“private areas”

Really? Were they unclothed? If not, perhaps there’s a different message here that you may have missed?

Go watch “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”, which I believe you’ll find on Netflix too. You’ll totally cheer along when they murder the fat man, who completely deserved it BTW. Though if you’re still cheering when they watch the home video they made of themselves murdering that entire family, then you may have missed the point of that film too.

Good film is a mirror on real life. And if real life doesn’t make your skin crawl, it’s either because you haven’t realized you’re a participant in it too… or because you actually enjoy it.

Sorry, I don't want to see zoomed in shots of little girls' crotches, clothed or not, regardless of any context. I don't really have much more to argue about.

Then don't. Stop talking about The Film That Can't Be Named.

It's not a documentary.

Only 1 kid rejects it.

I'm not sure how the plot to any porn is really relevant to if it is porn or not.

Right, but I think what most people are pissed off about is the creator's hypocrisy. She says it's not about glorifying the sexualization of children...yet has multiple multi-minute takes of doing just that, when the point could have gotten across without doing so.

I think she edited the documentary poorly, also I don't think it's a very good documentary.

It did get everyone talking about the problems of media sexualizing(is that word?) kids.

So maybe it's a great documentary! Not sure.

But do we need a 'documentary' to tell us this is wrong? I would guess that most individuals would agree it's immoral regardless of where you are on the political spectrum albeit for possibly different reasons.

This is like making a movie about why dog fighting is bad and having a movie poster depicting dog fighting in a glamorous light but then having to watch the movie to show that's it's a problem. This is even worse though because children are more easily influenced by what is culturally acceptable. I know the whole 'save the children' is overused now but this is actually a situation where children really should be protected, and I as parent shouldn't have them assaulted by this.

> I think she edited the documentary poorly

You keep calling this a documentary- it’s not. This is a fictional movie where the creator chose to script, direct, film, and produce scenes of hyper-sexualized little girls.

Why do you keep saying the word "documentary?"